Historical Gose Recipes Part 3

Since it is prepared so differently the making of the Gose deserves some comment. The grain used is solely wheat and the more pure, plump and beatiful the better the malt and beer will get. The amount should never be under three and a half Wispel. In order to tame the sweetness of the wheat and to prevent the beer from getting sour some Scheffel of Hops should be added. The malt is never kilned but germinated and dried under the free air. It need a lot of care to create the malt always in the same quality. The owner has to watch it day and night so he does not miss the right moment to get it out of the growth bed and break it apart.

The brewing pan, which is shared between brewers, contained 290 Eimer. All the malt except 3 sacks is put into a large vat (in german it is “Bottich” which means open container of some sort mostly wood). Boiled water from the pan is poured through chutes (Gerinne) on top of the malt and is mixed thoroughly through. After it extracted the power from the grist it will be boild for some hours. This extract is the best wort and is called “Beste Krug”.

Water is again added to the grist in the vat. After this runnings are coocked they are stored in seperate vessels in the cellar since every infusion is weaker than the one before. The beer is filled into casks with a certain proportion of every running. The beer has to be fermenting before it is filled. The filling is done by selected and sworn in people. This is the source of the different kinds of gose. Each has a different amount of the best wort in them. The prices for these types are also different. The gose types that are drunk at the table are sold for four Pfennige a Maaß, the ones that are better cost 6 Pfennige and the strongest kind one Mariengroschen. The last one is a strong drink which should not be drunk till full, otherwise he would get drunk.

I tried to measure the weight of 1 liter of malt and the result was 600g for a liter of wheat. I think there where a lot of things in the wheat including the sprouts that where not as good removed as with modern malt, so I would think it would be more around 450-500g/l.

When we add this up it is about 2250 kg of malt. The hard part is now to guess how efficient the mash was. Considering the description of the process I would guess around 50-60%.

The hops are stated as some Scheffel, a Scheffel is around 50 Liter but how much weighs a liter of hops. Maybe next time I harvest hops I will check.

Concerning the volume of the brewing pan. Eimer is a weird format for liquid there where around 123 different meassures for Ohm and Eimer in that time so knowing how big the brewing pan was is next to impossible.